1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a software specification and program information storing and utilizing technique which is suitable for a system, software or program designer to make a novel software by making use of existing software specification and source program and, more particularly, to a retrieval keyword selecting system using dictionary information, which is suitable for developing a novel software by analyzing a request specification in a natural language and by retrieving the existing specification for its correction and reuse.
2. Description of the Prior Art
In the prior art, the data base and management technique of a software specification is discussed in ACM, SIGOA (June, 1984), pp. 132-142.
The prior art discussed takes no consideration into automation of new registration of the specification in a data base and has a problem that the existing data base has to be analyzed by the operator to register the new specification.
In order to retrieve the specification at a certain level as to a developed consistent system (e.g., the system of a customer A), moreover, the prior art can input the customer system name and the detail level to retrieve the specification of a requested software or a source program. When the user is not acquainted with the business system to be retrieved, no consideration is taken into the retrieval of what the user desires, and the prior art has another problem that many trials and errors have to be repeated before the user can retrieve what he desires.
On the other hand, the keyword extraction from a Japanese sentence is also discussed in the prior art in Reports of Society of Japanese Electronic Communications, '82/10, vol. J65-D, No 10 (1982), pp. 1195-1202.
The keyword extraction method of the prior art makes a detail syntax to extract the keywords in accordance with the roles of the words in the syntax. As to the selection of the extracted keywords, unnecessary words such as prefixes and suffixes are eliminated, but the other words are not taken into consideration. This makes it impossible to judge whether or not the keywords are effective. This judgement is either made by the operator or to decide that all be the keywords so that it cannot cope with many unknown words appearing in the request specification to a new system. Thus, the prior art has a problem in the performance of the retrieval keywords when the existing specification is to be retrieved.